Aladdin O'Brien eBook

Yankee Doodle came to town
Riding on a pony,
Stuck a feather in his Hat,
And called it macaroni.

XXIII

A tongue of land with Richmond (built, like another
capital beginning with R, on many hills) for its major
root, and a fortification vulgarly supposed to be
of the gentler sex for its tip, is formed by the yellow
flow of the James and York rivers. To land an
army upon the tip of this tongue, march the length
of it and extract the root, after reducing it to a
reminiscence, was the wise plan of the powers early
in the year 1862. To march an army of preponderous
strength through level and fertile country, flanked
by friendly war-ships and backed by unassailable credit;
to meet and overcome a much smaller and far less rich
army, intrenched behind earthworks of doubtful formidableness,
and finally to besiege and capture an isolated city
of more historic than strategic advantages, seemed
on the face of it as easy as rolling a barrel downhill
or eating when hungry. But the level, fertile
country was discovered to be very muddy, its supply
of rain from heaven unparalleled in nature, its streams
as deadly as arsenic, and its topography utterly different
from that assigned to it in any known geography.
Furthermore, in its woods, and it was nearly all
woods, dwelt far more mosquitos than there are lost
souls in Hades, and each mosquito had a hollow spike
in his head through which he not only could but would
squirt, with or without provocation, the triple compound
essence of malaria into veins brought up on oxygen,
and on water through which you could see the pebbles
at the bottom. A bosom friend of the mosquito,
and some say his paramour, was little Miss Tick.
Of the two she was considerably the more hellish,
and forsook her dwelling-places in the woods for the
warm flesh of soldiers where it is rosiest, next the
skin. The body, arms, and legs of Miss Tick
could be scratched to nothing by poisonous finger-nails,
but her detached head was eternal, and through eternity
she bit and gnawed and sometimes laughed in the hollow
of her black soul. For the horses, mules, and
cattle there were shrubs which disagreed with them,
and gigantic horse-flies. And for the general
at the head of the vast body of irritation there was
an opposing army whose numbers he overrated, and whose
whereabouts he kept discovering suddenly. It
is said that during the Peninsular campaign the buzzards
were so well nourished that they raised a second brood.